Jordanian Protests
Nine weeks before the Houthis stunned the region by breaking out of their northern strongholds, Karl Miller told me it was coming. In a private note dated July 1, he reasoned that Mohammed bin Salman was running his familiar balance-of-power game — placing bets around his perimeter to deny Iran, Turkey, and Iraq any added leverage, the Houthis included — and from that premise drew two specific calls: that the Houthis would push into rebel-held territory in the south if the chaos handed them an opening, and that the UAE- and Saudi-backed factions arrayed against them were not organized. Both landed. In September the Houthis drove on Mokha, took Perim Island, and reached the Bab el-Mandeb coast while the coalition line dissolved into the desert. It was a hedged, mechanism-up call, not a claimed bullseye — but he read the opening before it opened.
I lead with that because Miller has now turned the same lens on Jordan, and his conclusion is blunt: the Hashemite monarchy faces economic breakdown and the fall of royal rule inside the coming year. His new private forecast, dated September 14 and looking out through September 2027, is not a think-tank thumb-sucker. It is a continuity brief written for operators on the ground, and its argument deserves a serious hearing — with its hedges kept intact and a base-rate caveat I’ll come to at the end.
The thesis
Miller’s forecast rests on three assumptions stacked on top of one another: that meaningful American protection becomes unreliable at the moment the palace needs it; that organized domestic opposition widens beyond anything concession or coercion can contain; and that the loyalty of the commanders and institutions who make royal decisions enforceable finally cracks. Pull those three together and he sees a collapse sequence that runs in order — external protection loses credibility, opposition expands, palliatives fail, commanders defect, royal authority breaks, and the king is forced out into a contested struggle over what remains of the state.
He is careful, to his credit, to call this a forecast rather than a fait accompli, and to name his own intelligence gaps. But the structure of the argument is worth walking through, because each pillar is doing real work.
Pillar one: the American backstop
The load-bearing assumption is external. Miller’s sharpest analytical move is to separate three things most commentary blurs together — physical presence, actual capability, and political commitment. American personnel can remain in Jordan, intelligence and financing and logistics can keep flowing, and none of it amounts to a promise to intervene in a domestic confrontation. A monarchy can be surrounded by allies and still be alone at the decisive moment.
The cost of hosting those allies, meanwhile, keeps rising. He points to the January 2024 Tower 22 strike that killed three American service members — attributed to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq — and to reporting of damage to US aircraft in Jordan this September. Each such episode hands domestic opponents a concrete grievance against the alliance and chips at the premise that the American relationship buys the palace security rather than exposure. The danger Miller flags is not a formal US withdrawal but something subtler: a backstop that is present without being protective at the hour it is tested.
Pillar two: the legitimacy gap
The second pillar is the one every analyst of Jordan circles, and Miller handles it with more discipline than most. Jordanians of Palestinian origin make up an estimated 55 to 70 percent of the population — a figure he explicitly flags as an uncertain estimate, not a verified count, with intermarriage steadily blurring the categories — while East Bank Jordanians continue to dominate the army, the security services, and the machinery of state. The vulnerability is the gap between social weight and access to power.
But he does not make the lazy move of treating demography as destiny. His threshold for real danger is organizational, not numerical: sustained cooperation across Palestinian-origin and East Bank constituencies, joined to groups able to interrupt economic activity, expressed through coordinated strikes and — the decisive marker — defections among the elites who currently keep the system running. He treats organized armed mobilization as a separate and higher escalation threshold, and insists that population size alone establishes none of it. The renewed Gaza killing, including deaths reported on September 13 despite the ceasefire, is the accelerant, each episode deepening the sense that royal diplomacy delivers nothing for Palestinians. A July 30 open letter demanding US military withdrawal, signed across both communities, is the kind of convergence signal he says to watch — not yet the thing itself.
Pillar three: the money
The economics give the political story its detonator. Growth ran about 2.8 percent in 2025 against reported unemployment of 21.4 percent among Jordanians — expansion too weak to relieve the household pressure underneath. The state leans on external financing to buy time: a nonbinding US. assistance memorandum seeks at least $1.45 billion a year through FY2029, but Miller rightly notes that an announced multiyear commitment is not the same as money in the account, and appropriations can slip precisely when security costs and social demands are climbing. Reserves offer a cushion — nearly $27 billion in gross usable terms at the end of March, though much of the 2025 gain was gold revaluation rather than fresh liquidity — and the mid-2026 baseline still called the debt sustainable and sovereign stress moderate. That baseline, however, assumed disruptions would fade around midyear. September’s fighting breaks that assumption.
His transmission mechanism is the strongest part of the economic case: the crisis reaches the throne through payrolls and payments. Watch, he says, for persistent salary arrears, missed obligations to essential suppliers, and restrictions on bank transfers — the signs that financial stress has reached the state’s operating core. Those are the indicators that turn a budget problem into a political one.
Pillar four: water and the wire
The fourth pillar brings state failure into the kitchen. Jordan is among the most water-scarce countries on earth — roughly 61 cubic meters of renewable freshwater per person a year — and delivery depends on power, functioning equipment, and utilities that can pay their bills. A fuel or electricity shock can therefore deepen a water crisis without anyone touching a pipe, and the long-term fixes, like the Aqaba-to-Amman conveyance, cannot be powered and plumbed fast enough to matter in an acute emergency. Miller’s operational point is the unsettling one: infrastructure can fail before the politics resolve. Flights, port access, freight, power, and water can each seize up and force a business to suspend regardless of who sits on the throne — which is why his brief tells operators to set departure triggers against measured service performance now, not to wait for a political verdict.
If the throne falls
Miller is clear that removing the palace solves nothing by itself. A successor inherits the same water scarcity, the same joblessness, the same financing dependence, the same vulnerable supply lines — and must, on day one, secure command, establish legitimacy, meet payrolls, and keep the lights on. He sketches three outcomes: a military-led transition that preserves much of the state, a negotiated civilian arrangement if institutions and factions can agree on interim authority, or fragmentation if armed actors reject a common command and fight over territory and revenue. Layered over all three is the West Bank: a successor under pressure to confront Israel more forcefully, and the severe-case risk that cross-border involvement drags the transition into direct confrontation. Mobilization can remove a ruler, as he puts it; it does not supply a budget or a chain of command.
Here is where Miller’s own hedges deserve amplifying. The base rate for predicted Hashemite collapse is poor. The monarchy survived Black September in 1970, when it fought an actual civil war against armed Palestinian factions and won. It survived the 1989 austerity riots. It rode out the 2011 Arab Spring that toppled governments around it. Betting against this throne has a long history of losing, and a forecast of collapse “within the year” should be read against that record, not in isolation.
What makes Miller’s brief worth the desk time anyway is not the certainty of its conclusion but the quality of its trigger list. The value is in knowing what to watch: sustained joint mobilization across the two communities; public repudiation by the establishment figures who currently defend the order; security units refusing central orders; payroll and essential-service arrears; and rival authorities holding territory the state cannot reclaim. Those are the tells that would tell you the improbable is becoming the actual — and they are, as of today, the things to track. Given how his July read of Yemen turned out, I would not file this one away.
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Israel reportedly helping the Saudis with the Houthis:
Ansarullah tanks roll toward Ta’izz:
Sulaiman and I discussed the Saudi desperation over the Houthi offensive:
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The Hashemite Endgame: The Case That Jordan Is Next
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at Sonar21.